Lazy Designer: Pricing

Okay, this is perhaps a strange blog post but I’ve been spending some time thinking about this and figured I’d solicit opinions from the readers out there.

(And yes, I’m sure I’m overthinking this).

Anyways…

To reward (or at least avoid punishing) those of you who purchase my Lazy Designer books as they are released I am considering adjusting their prices. Not right now, but down the road when the third and fourth books are complete. What I imagine will happen at that point is that I’m going to want to combine all four books into one convenient (albeit higher priced) book. This was my original intention with the Lazy Designer series.

Such a book will likely need to be priced less than what buying the books separately would cost a reader. Why less? I just feel that there’s a certain price point on Amazon that once you pass it, it becomes more difficult to convince readers to part with their money. I might be wrong. Anyways, I do not want existing readers to feel like I am punishing them or that it is better to wait until all four books are released together.

So what I am proposing to do is to raise the prices of the existing books somewhat once the combined edition is ready. The prices would stay at what they are until the combined edition is available (probably not until late 2013 or early 2014). At that point the price on all of the separate volumes would increase by a dollar or so, each.

What I’m hoping to do is to maintain an incentive for readers to buy the separate volumes now but to encourage new readers to purchase the combined edition over the individual volumes, when it is available.

Other solutions include never releasing a combined volume or offering some sort of additional (non price related) incentive now. I could also consider removing the separate volumes once the combined edition is released.